


the saltwater room

by badskeletonpuns



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Friendship, Gen, it's good, wolf 359 secret santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 05:32:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13264740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badskeletonpuns/pseuds/badskeletonpuns
Summary: Late-season 2ish Minkowski & Eiffel bonding, also featuring angst, bittersweet memories, sad smiles, blue stars, and hugging. The hugging is very important.Secret Santa gift for jennatalbot!





	the saltwater room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JennaTalbot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaTalbot/gifts).



> Oops, this is both late and somewhat angstier than I intended? But!! It's still minffel bromance, and that was the prompt! Hope you enjoy, jennatalbot! :D

The ventilation was on the fritz again. It did that a lot lately, the stress on the ship and its AI causing growing piles of glitches and errors. On their own, nothing massive. 

But they weren’t on their own. 

Nothing exists in a vacuum. (Well, except for the crew of the Hephaestus, separated from the vacuum of space by just a few layers of steel and insulation.)

Today this meant that the air was thin and cold, and no one could work for long without getting light-headed and breathing hard. It was, in Eiffel’s opinion, not that much of an issue. Lovelace and Minkowski thought otherwise, and had spent the day running out of breath from arguing with various other members of the crew or trying to finish repair jobs regardless of the lack of oxygen in the air. For Hilbert’s part, all the scientist had was unnerving statistics regarding brain damage in mountaineers who spent a lot of time in low-oxygen environments.

Eiffel had taken refuge from these uncomfortable facts and pissed-off commanding officers in a small room he’d discovered on the Hephaestus. It must have been extra storage space at some point, empty cupboards and open boxes lacking any purpose now. Eiffel had picked this room specifically due to the small, round window on one side of the room. Wolf 359 spilled blue light into the room, almost teal through the thick glass.

It was like being underwater, floating alone in the middle of the room. No gravity, little air, the sounds from the rest of the station muted by the thick door. 

His breath came slowly, each movement of his chest up and down marked by the stillness of the environment. He’d turned off his comms unit (Hera could alert him if anything life-threatening was going on, it would be fine.) Eiffel floated in the middle of the room, quiet for once in his life. The Hephaestus was far larger than the four of them needed, but even so the four of them were almost never apart from each other for very long. No one would be able to find Eiffel here very easily, though, so he had at least an hour or two of blessed chore-free relaxation. 

The door behind him whooshed open, and he cursed himself for giving the universe so obvious an opportunity to prove him wrong. 

“So this is where you’ve been hiding.” 

It was Minkowski, and so far she sounded more bemused than angry. 

Eiffel tipped his head back to watch her. His commanding officer closed the door behind her, cutting off the light from the hallway. The room filled with the blue light of the star, engulfing the two of them. 

She smiled at him—weary, small, but still a smile. “You working hard or hardly working up there?”

Eiffel shrugged, grinning back at her. “I think it all depends on your point of view, Commander.” 

Minkowski just hummed a little, and pushed off of the floor gently to float up next to him. “I forget how beautiful it is sometimes,” she said. Wolf 359 burned outside the window, flares and ripples of blue light shifting with every moment on its surface. Much of the smaller details weren’t visible to the naked eye, even if the treated glass of all the Hephaestus windows allowed the crew to look directly at it. “The night after I knew I had this job, I found Wolf 359 in the sky.” She laughed and shook her head. “It was still red then. If only I’d known how much would change.” 

The room was silent after she spoke, neither one of them wanting to talk about all the things that had happened to them since the start of their voyage. The plant monster, Hilbert’s betrayal, Captain Lovelace, all of the mysteries and dangers inside this ship. So many tragedies. 

Eiffel sighed. “Yeah, Commander. I hear you.” 

He didn’t think about his past before he’d boarded the Hephaestus, and how he’d spent the night after he got in the job lying in an uncomfortable bed in a Goddard-funded motel stay. Staring at the ceiling and wishing so, so hard for any change at all in his future.

He’d definitely gotten that, if nothing else. 

Minkowski turned to look at him. “Not all bad, though. Right?” 

And with that hopeful almost-smile on her face and the way she nudged his shoulder, he couldn’t do anything except agree with her. After all, for everything that they’d gone through, there had also been awkward but happy Thanksgiving dinners and drunk renditions of Broadway songs and gleeful disbelief (with a side of terror) at harpoon guns and this, here. Minkowski smiling at him. 

Eiffel reached out to pull her into a hug, consequences be damned, and rested his head on top of hers. He always forgot how much shorter than him she was until moments like this, when there was no way he couldn’t see it. “Definitely not all bad. And the future will be even better, you’ll see.” 

And for a second, he actually believed himself.


End file.
